Electric Scooter Startup Brings Street Cred, Makes City Mad

An electric-scooter rental startup led by a former Uber and Lyft executive that has sparked a legal battle in Santa Monica, California, has landed $15 million in funding to expand across the US.

Rob Price | Business Insider

Bird is a startup that lets customers rent dockless electric scooters (or “Birds”) with the tap of an app and then leave them on the street when they’re done. It first launched in Santa Monica, the ocean-facing city near Los Angeles, in September — sparking disruption, hundreds of traffic stops, and a criminal complaint against the startup and its founder.

The startup has since expanded to other neighborhoods in Los Angeles County and San Diego, and on Tuesday it announced it had raised $15 million in venture-capital funding led by Craft Ventures to support its expansion throughout the US.

The company says it has 50,000 active users and has seen 250,000 rides on its platform. (It isn’t disclosing its valuation or revenue.) The startup aims to have a presence in 50 US markets by the end of 2018, its founder and CEO, Travis VanderZanden, told Business Insider.

“These scooters literally just began showing up on our streets last fall,” Santa Monica’s director of policy, Anuj Gupta, told the paper. “The challenge is that they decided to launch first and figure it out later.”

Asked if he thought Bird made mistakes with its launch, VanderZanden answered carefully: “Our approach is to work with cities very early on in the process, so we reached out, started a dialogue with Santa Monica the week we actually launched … Any time there’s new innovation it’s never clear exactly where you fit into the permitting and regulatory scheme.”

He added: “I’m happy to say in the last month we’ve made a ton of progress working with the city of Santa Monica … Santa Monica is an environmentally friendly city. I think ultimately we all agree Bird is a good thing for the city.”

About Rob Price

Rob is a News Editor at Business Insider, based in San Francisco. He focuses on the technology industry and breaking British news. He was previously a senior reporter for Business Insider in London, reporting on big tech business, policy, and the gig economy. Before that, he worked as a staff writer for the Daily Dot.

Resources

Ledetree

The source for your Lede

Real people bringing you real news about the real world. We’re not bots. We want to help you find the information you want in a changing world.

We cover new ideas, and emerging industries, from the booming cannabis business to the latest in health, to tech entrepreneurs building the world we’ll all live in tomorrow – and the policy issues that come with those emerging trends.